Sacred Hunger (54 page)

“I don’t want to be thought different from him,” he said. ‘There is something else I remember him saying.” He had made no move to take her in his arms or touch her in any way, and after a moment she turned aside from him.

Feeling the touch withdrawn, watching her move away, his loss was bitter to him. He had felt for that moment all the essence of promise in her, the warmth of her hands on him, the uncertain tenderness of her breath, the wide, undefended look of her eyes. Her words were brave but he knew she was wrong, she was deceiving herself, he had lost everything.

He said, “He told me he should never have gone into cotton. He began in sugar, you know.”

He was silent for some moments. He did not know what to talk about. There was nothing to say. She was part now of the debts and losses, part of the restitution he had to make—he was making a start with her. “I intend to put that right,” he said. ‘I intend to go into sugar.”

“You will do as you please,” she said. “Nothing anyone else says will make a farthing of difference to you, I know that well, everyone knows it.” This calling of the world to witness was something she did often in argument; but her voice quivered now with the first real pain she had ever had to deal with alone. “When you first began coming, when you looked at me so, I did not find you agreeable at all, I thought you overbearing and farouche, and everybody thought it too. Then you ruined the whole play and you knew that I so much wanted to be in it, and I thought that it meant you cared more for me than you cared about pleasing me, and this was different from the other young men that talked to me. I know now that I was a fool to think it—it was pleasing yourself that you were set on.”

He did not know how to answer her, nor why she was reviving past complaints when there was only this overwhelming present of his poverty. It was as if she was speaking in a language he was not fully familiar with. “It is a simple matter enough,” he said. “Your father has forbidden the match. I cannot go against him. I have been left without a penny. I have nothing to offer you.”

“No, Erasmus,” she said, and her voice was clear and unfaltering now. “That is not the reason.”

Once more, for the last time, he saw on her face the expression he had always found both fascinating and disturbing: the half-closed eyes, the luminous pause before the words came, that brief contortion of the mouth, like a prelude to ecstasy. But the words when they came were sad with final knowledge: “It is not because you have nothing to offer me but because you have nothing now to add me to.”

He felt anger at this. She had belittled his sacrifice. With a brief phrase of farewell he turned away. She did not answer, but as he passed out of the room she called loudly after him in a voice that returning tears had made inarticulate —perhaps it was an attempt to call his name.

The declarations had been made already in the course of these interviews with father and daughter; but they needed to be uttered in the shrine of his room, where loneliness and custom could bind them into the sanctity of a vow.

As always, his possessions, things deeply familiar to him, acted on his sensibilities like objects of ritual. The fact that the house and most of its contents would soon be coming under the hammer gave force and fervour to his words, as a promise takes more poignant strength when uttered in the midst of danger and change. Kneeling at his bedside while sparrows chirped their loves in the eaves over the window, he spoke to God and his silver spurs and the pistols on the wall and his mother’s framed embroidery extolling the virtues of the meek.

“Every penny.” It was less than a whisper.

There were only the slight, plosive sounds of his dry and fervent lips, the click of tongue in the dry mouth. “I will restore my father’s good name. I will go into sugar.”

Sir William Templeton, His Majesty’s Principal Secretary to the West India Office, was at his dressing-table, still in turban and flowered banyan. His levee had scarcely begun.

He had just dismissed with promises a half-pay naval officer, unemployed now that the wars with France were ended, who was seeking his influence with the Admiralty but lacked the guineas necessary to assure it.

His footman entered to announce the name of a gentleman on business waiting at present in the ante-room with the others, but not the sort to kick his heels long, the footman remarked comthere was between servant and master a close understanding of mutual convenience.

‘He would not be fobbed off,” the footman said.

“He has a short way with him, sir.”

“Aye, and a long purse, you rascal, I make no doubt,” his master said. “He must have shown you the lining of it for you to bring his name with this dispatch.”

Briefly pleased with this piece of wit he twitched thin lips in the looking-glass. His face was narrow and long, very pale beneath the crimson silk of his turban, with a mouth that turned up at the corners in an accidental simper oddly at variance with the generally downward-sloping, lugubrious cast of his features. He knew who this visitor was, though he did not say so to the servant, whose eye was upon him keenly.

“Where the devil is my hot chocolate?”’ he said. “Why am I kept waiting in this fashion?

Now is the time I need sustenance, sir, as I address myself to the business of the day. Get within and see to it and send Bindman hither to me so I may discuss with him what I shall be wearing.”

“Yes, sir. And the gentleman?”’

“When you have seen to all that,” Templeton said with assumed carelessness, “you may admit this person.”

He spent the interval before his mirror. Entering, Erasmus Kemp saw the Secretary’s long face, gaudy with rouge just applied but not smoothed in yet, looking fixedly at him in the glass, framed by the swimming or flying putti round the rim and beyond this by the pale blue and rose pink stucco cornucopias round the arches of the recessed bedchamber.

For some moments the two men regarded each other thus. Then Templeton rose and advanced with languid affability, taking short and mincing steps in his loose Turkish slippers. “My dear sir, curse me, this is a pleasure,” he said, holding out his hand. “Will you take a seat, sir? I trust you are well?”’

“Tolerably well, I thank you.” Kemp regarded the Secretary with a sombreness the warmth of his welcome had done nothing to relax. The years had taken colour from his cheeks and compressed his lips with a certain grimness of endurance or denial comthough it was not evident whether of claims from within or without. But the eyes were unchanged: narrow and very dark, with a piercing insistence of regard that verged always on the antagonistic. He was dressed faultlessly in a suit of dark brown velvet set off by foams of lace at the neck and cuffs. His black hair was longer now, in accordance with the fashion; he wore it free of powder, caught in a dark red ribbon behind.

“We need not make a long business of this,” he said. “I shall not encroach on your time more than is needful. You have affairs of state to look to.”

“Cares of state, sir, I prefer to name ‘em.

There is a neat epigram to be got out of that rhyme, but these days, alas, I have no time for composition. Do you scribble yourself, sir? No? One needs peace for it. You will not mind if I continue with my toilette? I am bidden to my Lady Everney’s in the forenoon.”

“Indeed? By all means, continue. I would not have you disappoint Lady Everney.”

Templeton shot him a sharp glance in the mirror, but made no reply. He had begun touching in the paint with a small brush.

“You know me and you know whom I represent,”

Kemp was beginning, “so there is no need for -“

A small negro page boy in a white turban and surcoat came in bearing a sugar bowl, a steaming cup of chocolate and a plate of wafers on a japanned tray.

“About time, my pretty fellow,”

Templeton said. “Set it down here beside me. You must learn to be sharper.”

The little boy smiled and his eyes flashed eagerly.

He had teeth of amazing perfection.

“He doesn’t know much English as yet,”

Templeton said. “I haven’t had him above two weeks. I got him at auction at George’s Coffee House in the Strand. I gave the last one to my Lord Granville, who had taken a fancy for him. This one is even better-looking. One should buy them pockmarked of course, ‘tis more secure, but I like a smooth skin. Will you take some chocolate?”’

“Thank you, no,” Kemp said. “I have breakfasted but lately.” This was not strictly true as it was now mid-morning, but a certain kind of disgusted impatience was growing in him and he had no wish to share more than was necessary with the man before him—the knowledge there was between them had to be shared, and the space of the room and the stale air in it.

‘So then,” Templeton said to the negro boy, waving an irritable hand. “Why are you waiting there?

Shoo, shoo, shoo. G.”

“I am come on the same grounds as last time,”

Kemp said in level tones. “Nothing of substance has been achieved on your part since then, in spite of the monies made over to you for your use as you thought fit.”

“Ah, base metal, curse me, I knew we should soon come to money,” Templeton said in a tone of disdain.

“Yes, sir, money,” Kemp said with a slight smile. “You find it a wearisome topic, I dare say, but those who dispense it incline to take an interest in how it is used.”

His disgust persisted. It was more for himself now. I should have sent someone else, he thought. But he trusted no one. He knew that Templeton was frightened and that his every gesture and inflection was assumed to disguise the fact. He knew more: he knew the man’s circumstances, his connections, those who were in his interest, those who were in his pocket, his gambling debts, his taste for boys, his wife of the days before his preferment alone and drunken in their country house, consoling herself with footmen. He was sick to the soul with his knowledge of Templeton.

“No doubt it is perverse of them to press enquiry so far,” he said drily, “but there it is.”

“You are sarcastic, sir. It is not true to say that nothing has been achieved. I have risked displeasure at court by resisting demands for increased sugar duties to swell the revenues. There has been no increase since they were raised to help finance the war with the French, and that is close on four years now.”

He had spoken with indignation, real or assumed.

But there was nothing assumed about the unsteadiness of his hands when he set down his cup. “Not to have agreed then would have cost me my place, it would have branded me as unpatriotic,” he said.

“If you will forgive me,” Kemp said, in the same level tones, “the duties would have been kept down in any case, even without your support.

As you are aware, we have fifty-three members of the House of Commons voting in our interest directly, as well as some others, whom we both know, whose pockets are affected one way or another. We are strong enough to turn the balance in parliament on any West India business. It is not for the conduct of bills in the House that we need your interest. You know that well, I think, Sir William. We need your voice behind the scenes, in the Council, your urgent -“

At this moment the valet entered with garments draped over one arm, holding a long stick with a half a dozen wigs on it before him like a lance.

“Ah, Bindman,” Templeton said, grateful for the diversion. “Let us see, now.”

“I thought the claret-coloured suit, sir, with the silver stitching,” the valet said, after a brief bow to Kemp, “and a silver wig to go with it; a dull-toned wig will not do well with silver threaded on wine-colour, especially seeing that the suit is satin and has a high shine to it.”

He had spoken as he was obviously accustomed to speak, in high-pitched, intimate tones, as if there were no one else present.

He took some gliding steps into the bedchamber and laid the clothes on the bed. “This one?”’ he said returning, lifting one of the wigs delicately from the stick. He had produced from his pocket a little powder-bellows.

“Wait, you rogue,” Templeton said.

“Why do you always hurry me so?”’

“I would have this interview in private,” Kemp said coldly. ‘I cannot speak to you while this fellow capers about with wigs.”

Dignity required some delay in response to this. Templeton had commenced already to unfasten the high turban. He continued to do so, glancing at Kemp through the glass. Typical of the low-born fellow to be rendered uneasy by the presence of servants. Son of a provincial bankrupt. The times were bad that could throw up such creatures into positions of power. Templeton had his own sources of information and there was a file on Kemp in his office at the Ministry.

He took in the careless, lounging posture of his visitor, a carelessness at odds with the tight lips, the insolent intensity of the eyes. A man who had come from nothing and nowhere. It was a career meteoric even in these times of opportunity for the clever and unscrupulous. He had begun as an employee of the firm of Thomas Fletcher, which carried on an extensive trade with Jamaica, dealing on the London Exchange in sugar grown on its own plantations and imported in its own ships. He had made himself useful to his employers in a number of ways, some of them on the edge of legality and some beyond. Templeton knew something of these last, though not enough to be useful. Kemp had been twice to Jamaica to increase the firm’s holdings by bribing or intimidating local officials to sign foreclosure orders on small tenants who had fallen into arrears. These services and others more nebulous had brought him to a full partnership in five years. He had married sugar too, in the person of the daughter of Sir Hugo Jarrold, whose merchant bank had been founded on his connections in the West India trade. Elizabeth Jarrold had neither looks nor elegance but had made up for both by the fortune she had brought, said to be eighty thousand pounds. Kemp’s present wealth could only be guessed at; but the most important fact about him from Templeton’s point of view was that he had lately become Vice-President of the West India Association and could thus speak for the entire faction…